President Donald Trump on Wednesday named Brian Johnson as his pick to be the next director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In Johnson, Trump has turned to a trusted former aide and financial services executive who helped run the CFPB during his first term to now run the bureau for the rest of his second term in office, the AP reported.
The CFPB currently is led on an interim basis by Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director, who has openly denounced the CFPB and initially vowed to shut it down, Reuters reported. As those efforts have stalled in court, the administration now says it expects to substantially reduce the CFPB workforce.
Johnson was the deputy director of the bureau under Trump’s first CFPB Director, Kathy Kraninger, and he was known for being a powerful aide to Kraninger during her tenure who had significant leeway in deciding what the bureau should or should not work on, the AP reported. Since leaving the CFPB in 2020, Johnson worked at Patomak Global Partners and most recently as a senior executive at the credit card giant Capital One.
CFPB Largely Inoperable
The AP said that if confirmed by the Senate, Johnson will inherit a bureau that’s largely been inoperable since Trump came back into office and put Vought in charge on an acting basis. Much of the bureau’s recent activity has directed at unwinding its previous work.
The CFPB was created by Congress in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. It was designed to operate as an independent financial regulator with broad enforcement authority over consumer financial products and services.
Republicans have long seen the CFPB as an agency with too much centralized power and unaccountable to Congress, and they have repeatedly tried to diminish it since its creation, the AP noted.
